1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to information browsing, pervasive computing and telecommunications of messaging and multimedia content delivery of a content creator.
2. Description of Related Art
In general, information content is communicated on many different types of networks. (Content is created and/or provided by a content creator or author, which are used herein interchangeably.) Content provided in a certain form on one type of support terminal may be presented in a different form on another type of support terminal. For example, content provided on a large personal computer monitor or display of a desk top computer may have to be provided in a different form (different format, resolution of image, amount of data associated with the content, etc.) on a much smaller liquid crystal diode display of a mobile terminal such as a mobile phone. In order to support terminals with very different characteristics and capabilities (e.g. audio and visual), the content has to be transcoded from one form into another form. In effect, the intrinsic characteristic of the content may have to be changed to better suit the characteristics of a client terminal receiving the content and the capabilities of the network used for transmission of the content. There are two main transcoding approaches used in the prior art—either blind transcoding or content selection.
The first approach uses on-the-fly transcoding. This approach transforms existing content, namely images, to fit specific terminal characteristics by performing scaling, format conversion and color depth reduction, etc. However, since the transformations are blindly (i.e. by universal arbitrary policies) applied to the content (i.e. by arbitrary policies independent of author control), they are not guaranteed to provide acceptable results. For instance, the images may be scaled down to a point where they are unusable (e.g., important text may be unreadable, faces unrecognizable, objects too small to be visible). It may also be inappropriate to transform some color images to gray scale. Finally, content creators want to have control over the content that is distributed and don't want such “out of their control” alteration of the content to occur. For instance, the logo of a company may be altered in a manner that would not be acceptable to the company.
Alternatively, there exists another approach to overcome the problems associated with such blind manipulation. The second approach is based on the selection of content (smart content selection) for which multiple versions of content are created. The versions represent the same information (e.g., a photo) at different resolution, color depth, etc. A selection process chooses, based on the specific characteristics of each terminal, the most appropriate version to deliver. This provides full control to the content creators over the delivered content. However, storing a high number of versions requires a lot of storage space. On the other side, if not enough versions are created then the granularity of the content may not be small enough. For instance, suppose that an image should occupy the whole screen. Then if versions at resolutions of 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256 are created, they would not be optimal for a terminal supporting 100×100 without scrolling (since the 64×64 version may be selected and occupy only a small part of the screen).
In particular, WO 98/43177 discloses a system for dynamically transcoding data transmitted between computers. The system includes a network environment having a remote transcoding server arranged between a network client and the internet. The remote transcoding server has a transcoder with transcode service providers that transcode content based on predetermined selection criteria, such as content provider preferences, including: (1) the degree of alteration desired for its content, (2) the prioritization for download and display of different content types, (3) cache restriction or prioritization parameters such as update frequency or replacement preferences, (4) the types of users to target, (5) rules or programs to run for customizing content (for example, news or advertising, custom language translation software) based on user or client characteristics, (6) desire for receiving certain types of user or group data collected (for example, demographics or access patterns), and (7) the type of payment/reward offered in exchange for such information. The degree of alteration desired for its content gives content providers the capability to override any potentially content-altering service—for example, by using a pass-through technique triggered by a special tag embedded within the content. The network client may also have transcode service providers to transcode content before it is rendered to a user or to perform a counterpart transcoding function performed by a corresponding transcode service provider of the transcoding server. The subject matter of WO 98/43177, as well as any applications it claims benefit to, are incorporated by reference herein.